"Much better," he murmured. "Almost worth having it crushed for, in fact."
Mme. de Guéfontaine looked down at him without speaking, but he was aware, almost painfully aware, of the distress and remorse surging in her heart.
"I was sure that the Blues had got you—if they had not killed you," she said in a vibrating voice. "And all for me, for me who . . ."
"As far as I can tell," interrupted La Vireville lightly, "they rode over me and never saw me. I assure you that I have the devil's own luck, Madame; it is mixed with a good deal of an inferior kind, but it has always held to this point, that I have so far succeeded in cheating l'Ankou, as we call him in Brittany."
"My brother André had that kind of luck too," said she sadly. "But it failed him in the end."
La Vireville perceived that she wanted to talk about him—perhaps as a kind of amende honorable for her suspicions and hostility at Porhoët. "If you cannot sleep, Madame," he suggested, "will you not tell me about your brother? You see, I only knew of him as 'Alexis,' and I must tell you that I had got it into my head that his real name was de Kérouan or something of the sort."
"At what cross-purposes were we playing!" she exclaimed. "Do you really wish me to tell you about André?"
"If you will be so good," replied Fortuné. "Consider also, if you please, Madame, that I have procured you a chair here."
She smiled a little, and, bringing one quietly to the side of the settle, sat down, and began in her low and beautiful voice to tell him her history. There was a strange kind of unreal and yet intimate charm in this recital in the morning twilight, that went back now and then to childish days, some of which this old hall itself had witnessed. For here André and Raymonde du Coudrais, from their home in more western Brittany, had been used to visit an old uncle and aunt, and here they and their cousins had played hide-and-seek, and here André himself had lain hid only a week before his death. By reason of its early associations with that beloved brother the old place was now, the narrator confessed, painful to her, yet with a kind of sweetness. But the rest of the Carhoët country, she suddenly acknowledged in a voice that shook, had become intolerable to her.
An extraordinary devotion to her brother André had always been hers from childhood; listening to her, La Vireville thought that so ardent a nature as hers (beating under an exterior that in some ways belied it) must always have needed someone on whom to expend itself, and that having so early found that person, it was singularly fitting that she should never have been forced to transfer her allegiance. For André had never married, and her own marriage, in 1788, to a man many years older than herself, for whom it was evident she had not felt love, but much respect, had left unimpaired the bond between her brother and herself. The Comte de Guéfontaine's death in exile at Hamburg, in 1792, had set her free to serve André and the cause he followed with all her heart and soul. That was the year of the unfortunate Coblentz episode, of which she spoke with far more bitterness than of her brother's death; it was from Coblentz that he had come to her at Hamburg, not yet recovered of the wound to his body, and healed still less of that to his spirit. At Hamburg they had shared the privations of exile—and worse, the slight sneers of compatriots who looked askance at the Marquis de la Vireville's victim. Their pride at last drove them thence to England. And from England André had found the way to Brittany, the command of the Carhoët division, and his death. His sister had been with him all the time, nineteen months—a long spell of life for a Chouan leader.